10/08/2001 @ 12:00AM

Digital Rules

HOW TO RESPOND

Can we talk about wealth, this being the FORBES 400 issue? My verdict: Wealth is good. Were I on the 400 list, I’d want to fly to London and buy an elephant rifle from Holland & Holland. A more splendid big-game shooter is not made. These normally take two years to craft, including three or four visits to London for fittings, and will cost you about $130,000 apiece. The 4:1 scope is extra. But with added FORBES 400 vigorish–say another $100,000–I’d bet those H&H boys could pop one out in six weeks. That would be dandy with me. I’d need some time anyway to plan out the details of my shooting holiday in Afghanistan.

Create, Build, Lift Up

If you are one of those who thinks eternal bliss is assured by driving a planeload of fathers, mothers and children into a building at near-sonic speed, let’s face it, you are outside the gates of humanity. The world left you behind in A.D. 960, or thereabouts. Now, it’s the height of political incorrectness to say that some tribes of people are advanced and others, not. But can we abandon the PC muzzle for now–just for now? I don’t mind saying these things because they’re true, and they have nothing to do with race or IQ. The problem is societal.

One can imagine the management pickle for those who lead a tribe of backward souls who have lost a thousand years of progress. What do you do? What business bestseller on leadership do you read? Your options are very narrow. You can’t mobilize such poor folk to make looms, let alone cars, let alone computers.

We know what some leaders do. They tell their people that rational thought and inquiry and human advancement are the work of Satan. In the late Dark Ages the same line of thinking existed. Windmills were very controversial. Their appearance in Northern Europe coincided with the new millennium–A.D. 1000–and foreshadowed the debates to come about thought, science and progress. “Still, it moves,” said Galileo, referring to the earth’s rotation around the sun, as he was imprisoned in 1633 by authorities who’d amassed power by, essentially, blocking people from reason.

There are short-run and long-run answers to these attacks on civilization. The short-run answer is to summon civilization’s will to obliterate the perps and sear enough pain into their supporting nations’ memories so those nations won’t aid or abet the perps again. Ever. But the long-run answer is to reach out to these poor folk who pledge their allegiance to the perps. Never has there been a more pressing time to cast wide the seeds of democratic capitalism and lead the poor and backward into the light.

We can do it. Let’s all pledge to practice democracy and capitalism with a new level of inspiration, courage, confidence and hard work. Let’s do it with joy, and let the world see our smiles. Ours is the system that creates, builds and lifts up. On this point, be absolutely confident: Democratic capitalism is the most moral system the world has seen or will see. But it is not perfect–and can never be–and that is the crack that villains from Stalin to Bin Laden have exploited. We must be quick to repair our own cracks first, with kindness and inclusion when we fall short, as we will.

How will this attack change America? Let’s pray we don’t accommodate it too much. I’ll tell you how it will change me. I’m going to become more militant than ever about man’s absolute right to practice freedom and capitalism and human advancement. The grim flipside is that I will use this page–for as long as Steve lets me have it–to tarnish anyone who stands in the way of these good things or who blackens freedom’s name in a way that causes a Sudanese peasant to think his leaders are, after all, correct about freedom’s evils.

I may be talking about you. Mistreat your employees or ransack their pensions with Ponzi schemes and I’ll rip you a new one. Push porn or knowingly sell defective products and I’ll punch you in the nose. Give freedom and capitalism a black eye and I’ll blacken both of yours. I will never wink at you again. You, too, are an enemy of the civilized world.

Stop Funding Sickness

Write Bill Gates (billg@microsoft.com) and tell him to yank Microsoft’s funding of its opinion journal, Slate.com. Just hours after the bombings, Slate columnist John Lahr (also a theater critic for the New Yorker) mused about a Wag the Dog scenario. Lahr admits his first thought (later set aside) was that President Bush planned the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as a way to win support for his missile defense plan. Planned the bombings!

With a wink to Oliver Stone, Lahr writes: “We still don’t really know who killed Kennedy or Martin Luther King; it took us a long time to find out the hidden agenda to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident.’”

Slate editor Michael Kinsley is a decent guy. But he should offer his resignation to Gates, and Gates should accept it. And pull Slate‘s funding. We believe in free speech. So set Slate.com free, Bill.